The Coaching Mindset: 8 Ways to Think Like a Coach by Chad Hall

Author:Chad Hall [Hall, Chad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-08-17T18:30:00+00:00

FIVE: Get Curious

We humans don’t seem to know what to do with curiosity. We think it killed the cat. But we also think curious monkeys named George make for entertaining books and cartoon shows. Curiosity can conjure up notions of naiveté, something strange or unusual, someone who’s meddlesome, or someone who’s just plain odd.

In coaching, being curious is a good thing because it means the coach is willing to inhabit a space of not knowing. We ask the best questions and invite the client’s best thinking when we are curious.

Let’s be clear what kind of curiosity we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about satiating your curiosity. You’re a coach, not a reporter for the National Enquirer. You shouldn’t treat your client like a source for tabloid gossip or whatever interesting thing you want to know about. That kind of curiosity is coach-centered.

As a coach, you should exhibit a positive, client-centered kind of curiosity. Good coaches think, “That’s interesting, I wonder where this is going?”

The enemy of curiosity is judgment. A judging attitude says, “I know what this is.” It’s not that our judgments are always negative, as in “I know what this is and it’s bad.” Judging something as positive can be just as detrimental in coaching because judging shuts down the learning process. On the other hand, curiosity opens up the learning process.

Imagine your client shares that his son has decided to drop out of school. A coach with a judging mindset might think, “Oh, that’s bad. I’ll bet that’s upsetting,” and then ask, “What can you do to change his mind?” But a coach with a curious mindset will think something more along the lines of “I wonder what my client thinks and feels about that,” and then ask, “What do you think of that?” or “Think back to when he first told you he was dropping out, what was your first thought? …How are you thinking about it now?” The judging coach assumes what the issue is and races to tackle it; meanwhile, the curious coach invites the client to explore what’s going on, to expand his understanding of the situation, and to create new awareness before rushing to action.

Curiosity might first seem to slow things down, but in the long run it actually speeds things up. By starting slow, we invite the client to get to the heart of things first and to then act based on the real issue. A judging mindset often goes fast at first but then gets bogged down because it tends to specialize in quickly addressing the wrong issue.

So work on remaining curious and on inviting the client to get curious, too. When you tap into the client’s curiosity, you’ll knock him out of autopilot and compel him to get intentional about thinking through things in a fresh, new, and more helpful way.

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